How to hide all OSDs on Windows 10

When you use the dedicated volume and brightness keys on your keyboard to change either one of those two things, you get an on-screen display indicating the change. This OSD is not liked by many users. The major problem with it is that it sticks around too long. There’s no way to dismiss it. You can disable just the volume OSD or, if you want, you can hide all OSDs with an app called HideVolumeOSD.

If you judge the app by just its name, it seems like it’s only going to hide the volume OSD but it hides all the OSDs that Windows 10 adds. This includes the brightness OSD as well as the Airplane mode OSD.

Hide all OSDs

Download and install HideVolumeOSD. All you need to do is run the app and it will hide every single OSD that Windows 10 has.

This applies to the simple bar control that you see when you see you use the volume up/down keys when nothing is playing, or when you use the brightness up/down keys. It also hides the larger OSD you get when something is playing and you use the volume up/down control to change the volume.

Windows 10 groups this OSD with the notification delay that you can set. The notification delay decides how long a toast notification remains on your screen before it is automatically dismissed. You cannot set it below 5 seconds and that makes sense for notifications. For the OSD, there should be a way to disable it without having to resort to third-party apps. If nothing else, the Escape key, or a different key combination should be able to dismiss it.

RECOMMENDED FOR YOU

The keyboard controls all continue to work with this app running. If you want to check what the current volume is, you can look closely at the speaker icon in the system tray. It changes to reflect the volume level. It will not communicate it accurately since it only have four levels but it gives you a hint. Likewise, if you enable Airplane mode, the WiFi icon will be replaced with the Airplane icon. The only visual indication that you don’t get is one for brightness.

The app is pretty straight-forward and has no additional settings. You can’t choose which OSD is hidden, and which isn’t and that makes sense since it was originally made to hide the volume OSD. Considering this app can hide the OSDs that it doesn’t target, it likely means that Windows 10 treats all OSDs the same way and you can’t really differentiate between them.